How did the Muslim Volga Bulgars manage to hold off the Mongols for 13 years while the Christian Rus capitulated almost mediately?
>>17415742>why nomadic people harder to pin down and extract tribute from when its so easy to do so with settled people It's a real head scratcher
>>17415742The Bulgars avoided fighting the Mongols on the field and managed to outlast the Westward for the season so they left. Next time they came back and finished their conquest of the region and the Northern Russian principalities. I don't know why you framed it as a Muslim v Christian thing because many Russians did outlast the first Westward campaign and like the Bulgars only capitulated against later ones.
>>17415742the volgar bulgarians were basically the same as the mongols. nomadic central asian people with had lots of archers and horses. much harder to beat nomads as a nomad than it is to beat settled people as a nomad
>>17417155they weren't nomadic at this point, the Volga Bulgars were settled agriculturalists and very urbanized.
>>17417420This is the reason why their invasion of Japan failed as well. No, it wasn't just because of the divine winds meme. There were still a lot of Mongols invading Japan that got btfo by the Samurai horse archers.
>>17417435right. the places that the mongols conquered just sent mobs of people with shields and spears at them, literal cannon fodder for a guy with a bow on a horse. mongols got filtered over and over again by mobile, decentralized enemies
